The Effect of Social Media on Teenagers Essay Example

📌Category: Child development, Entertainment, Psychology, Social Media
📌Words: 761
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 23 February 2022

One Instagram post and you can feel the whole world is worshiping you! It can feel like social media has become this glorious space where people send heart and fire emojis. One post although can make life meaningless to the burnt-out honors teen, one post and a 13-year-old boy end it all, one post and the 16-year-old girl overdoses. Identity crises, Cyberbullying, and skyrocketing suicide rates are all negatives to the average teenager’s social media usage. 

Today’s youth is struggling to find their true identity, the identity that will mold habits and a part of their perception of this world. This can be very difficult for teenagers, when their world is flooded with Instagram likes and shares but also negative comments and nasty DM’s.  CNN supervising producer Chuck Hadad wrote an article titled “Why some 13-year-olds check social media 100 times a day.” Thirteen-year-old Kyla stated in the article “When I get my phone taken away, I feel kind of naked." While the disconnect from the world seems natural in this day of age, teenagers are connecting themselves to their phones more and more to ultimately find the person they want to become through Pinterest role models and Instagram influencers. The little girl who once played piano and found music as her safe place is now looking at the lives of others and “working on herself” by transforming into the picture-perfect person. What happens though when that picture-perfect person is getting messages to kill themself and would “look better” with some surgery?    

Imagine your fourteen-year-old self staring at a computer screen avoiding homework by looking down at your phone on, you guessed it, social media. When you open the app though you find comments, that doesn’t make you feel like the world is worshipping you. Those comments can be  “LOL her teeth are crooked, they are like a piano.” Or even “What a loser that outfit does not suit you at all!” The technical and common name for these statements and mean messages is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature. %44 of our adolescents have reported cyberbullying as of January 2020 with %79 revealing they experienced cyberbullying on YouTube, followed by Snapchat at %69, TikTok at %64, and Facebook at %49. Cyberbullying often occurs from people you know personally, it could be a mean cousin or mutual friend but comments much like the ones quoted previously have increased suicide and depression rates.

Many of our youth today enjoy social media and find it as a way to express themselves. Although a percentage of teenagers feel that social media can bring out the good and is a positive place, research shows that 1 in 5 teens in the US experience a serious mental breakdown due to the extensive and overuse of social media. Common Sense Media has taken a particular interest in the matter with a report on social media’s effects on teens. The report found that  “Youth with moderate to severe depressive symptoms were nearly twice as likely to say they used social media almost constantly”. Not only does this quote state that severely depressed teens are spending more time on social media, but they are spending that time on social media to numb the pain that they have not emotionally learned to deal with.  “People think depression is sadness. That it’s crying and dressing in black, but people are wrong. Depression is the constant feeling of being numb. It’s being numb to emotions, being numb to life. You wake up in the morning just to go back to bed again.”-Anonymous. Our adolescents are depressed and anxious not just because they have a history test that they must ace on to get the new Xbox, but teens are depressed and suicidal because social media has played a large role when teenagers see a Tik Tok from “sadxreelsT_T” that describes how they are feeling in that moment of their life, of that moment where finding themselves doesn’t seem so easy the internet makes it worse, social media worsens those feelings of loneliness and mental exhaustion. 

Social media is crippling our society and we will not notice until it’s too late. It won’t be until the family of the 16-year-old girl is crying at her memorial and it won’t be until the 13-year-old finally takes those hate comments and turns them into reality.  The harshly negative effects of social media on teenagers today is what generations before us warned teenagers about.  Our youth is not just our future doctors and lawyers, they are a father’s daughter, a mother’s best friend, and someones everything. Without any knowledge of the negative side of social media those daughters and best friends will be crying in their room at 2 AM with nowhere else to turn but to the screen that had already left them with so much disappear.

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